by Yu Young-nan
I never saw a water carrier during daylight hours. They seemed to work through the night and sleep during the day, a schedule I assume they kept because they wanted to be efficient and avoid long lines at the taps.
Hiring a water carrier meant not only paying for his service, but becoming part of a rotation that served him dinner. Since each carrier had several customers, every family’s turn came about once a month. Mother treated the water carrier as a highly honored guest when she cooked for him. She certainly never referred to him as trash even beforehand, but her incredible deference when he came for his meal struck me as out of line. Clearly, from the way our landlords treated him, there was no rule that said water carriers had to be fed well. They would simply scoop up a mound of rice that had been cut with other grains, and set it out for him along with a pot of bean paste stew and some chunks of pickled radish. They didn’t bother serving him on the veranda or in a sitting room, but just spread a thatched mat in the yard or on the kitchen floor.
Mother, though, made a special trip to the market, and then boiled and seasoned all sorts of vegetables. She even saw to it that there was meat. The savory aroma of sizzling oil wafted from the pan-fried treats she prepared. She’d make a pot of rice, scoop the gleaming grains into a large bowl, and then, with thorough precision, add another bowl’s worth of rice on top of it. I doubted that anyone could match Mother’s skill in this. We seemed to be preparing for a feast when we served his monthly meal.
My family in Pakchŏk Hamlet loved to look down on others, but the idea of serving them inferior food was appalling. Several times, I heard Grandfather caution the women sharply that families that treated guests differently depending on who they were never prospered from generation to generation. But in fact what my mother did amounted to reverse discrimination, for she prepared a better tray for the water carrier than for my brother on his birthday.
It wouldn’t have mattered so much if she’d served this fine repast in our kitchen area by the gate, but she’d call the carrier inside and offer him a cushion, embarrassing him deeply. Maybe Mother would have accepted the veranda as appropriate too, but ours was too narrow to set a tray down on. The water carrier, aging but sturdy, seemed to fill the room when he entered and took his seat. Even my young eyes found it distasteful—back then, separation of men and women remained strict.
Mother’s servings were so generous that the carrier couldn’t finish the side dishes, let alone his mountain of rice. When he could eat no more, Mother took the leftovers, set them in a new dish on a wooden tray, covered it all with a piece of patchwork fabric, and sent him on his way. Mother said that was what we were supposed to do with a water carrier’s table. She seemed to have deliberately made so much just so he’d have some to take home. The vendor, at a loss over how to express his thanks, told Mother to let him know if she ever needed more water than usual. He meant he’d carry a load for her for free, but it was obvious that Mother would never take him up on it.
I thought my penniless but usually oh-so-arrogant mother was much too nice to the water carrier. She treated him as more than an equal, and the respect she showed him annoyed me. I misconstrued it when she tried to get me to go out and play, for he seemed to pose a challenge to my territory. My presence seemed the best strategy to repulse this grave threat. I sat and glared at him as he ate, not budging from the corner of the room.
But my ridiculous suspicions were soon dispelled. One day, Mother mentioned in passing that the water carrier deserved not merely respect but envy—he was putting his son through college by peddling.
“I can’t help but look up to that old man when I think how he’s managed to get a college beret on his son’s head,” she sighed.
To her, it was pathetic that the best she could do was a commercial high school, although she was practically killing herself sewing day and night. I was relieved not to have doubts about the water carrier, but I began to pity Mother and her dreams.
Even today, I sometimes hear the expression “water carrier’s table,” referring to a table from which every last morsel of food has been cleared. Small things arouse my curiosity. Did the metaphor get started because of how ravenously water carriers ate or because of how they took leftovers home? More than anything else, the question reflects my humble upbringing in Hyŏnjŏ-dong.
4. Friendless Child
THE ADMISSION CEREMONY WAS HELD IN APRIL. Once more, I donned my silk coat and climbed hand in hand with Mother up and over the hill to school. The other children clearly had genteel backgrounds; most wore attractive, trim Western clothes. They looked different from the kids in my neighborhood.
Parents were requested to accompany their children for the first week and no more. We didn’t enter the classroom for roughly a month, but merely sang songs and played games in the grounds as we tagged along after our teacher, gradually becoming acquainted with the Japanese terms for the school facilities.
The first Japanese word we learned was hoanden. This was a small gray house that sat in a well-tended flower garden to the right of the playground. We learned that we were to show it the utmost respect. The perpendicular bows we were supposed to make as we passed it were far deeper than the ones we performed for our teachers. The hoanden had no windows, and its doors were shut tight except on national holidays, when we attended a ceremony instead of class. A podium would be set up. On it stood a lectern draped with a black velvet cover with golden fringes. We would form a line on both sides of the podium all the way up to the hoanden.
The principal appeared, decked out in black suit and white gloves. He soon passed in front, together with an entourage of several dignitaries, toward the hoanden. His beaming expression matched the medals that adorned his suit. We were allowed to stand upright as that solemn procession entered, but as soon as they emerged, a shout rang out as fast as lightning: “Most deferential bow!” At this, we were expected to virtually prostrate ourselves and be content with glimpses at the shoe tips of those VIPs.
I raised my head furtively and stole a glance at the principal as he walked. It gave me the same anxious thrill I’d felt when I snuck a peek into our house’s spirit shrine back in the village. The principal held a black lacquered box at eye level, and during the ceremony, he unfurled a roll from it, which he read out in a quavering voice.
Stored in the hoanden was the emperor’s message. It was long and so difficult that I couldn’t understand a word even once I had learned Japanese. The principal’s speech was even longer. The ceremony itself dragged on with such interminable tedium that some children fainted. Afterward, though, we were rewarded for enduring this incomprehensible ceremony with the forbearance required to survive torture—we received two Japanese rice cakes each.
The next item we learned after hoanden was the Japanese word for “toilet.” And then, in turn, “teacher,” “school,” “classroom,” “playground,” “friend,” and how to say our year and class. For a month, we followed our teacher around the playground, learning these terms. From the moment we enrolled, we were forbidden to use a word of Korean. The teacher repeated the names of everything around us and every action she or we did in Japanese, in order to help us commit them to memory. Every object was reborn. For a child like me with no prior knowledge of Japanese, that period was extremely difficult.
Mother, however, believed that study consisted solely in reading and writing: “You mean they still didn’t have you do any writing today?” She would then complain that they weren’t teaching us anything—and with tuition at eighty chon a month, no less.
Most kids brought one-won bills and bankbooks and deposited the twenty-chon change in accounts provided by the school. Mother would give me exactly eighty chon. Sometimes, though, after I expressed envy for the kids who made deposits, she upped it to ninety chon. But Mother’s resentment of my monthly tuition lasted only through that crucial stage when we were being trained so the teacher could guide us and communicate with us at a basic level without Korean.
In my teache
r I thought I’d finally found a model of what Mother meant by a New Woman. She was beautiful and smelled nice. All the children loved her. We would scramble about in a group as we moved around the playground, each of us eager to hold her hand. She was kind too, doing her best to dispense her attention and affection fairly among the children, who followed her like chicks waddling after a mother hen. She’d call the ones farther away to come closer, so everyone could have a turn clinging to her hands and skirt.
For some reason, I always lagged on the periphery and never made it within range of the teacher’s carefully distributed affection. From the fringe, it was easy to observe what was going on in the center. I could tell that a fixed group of children would hold the teacher’s hand or skirt, no matter how hard she tried to be fair. Most of those kids were attractive, smart, and outgoing. They were true natives of Seoul, different from my friends in the countryside and in Hyŏnjŏ-dong.
I practically drooled with envy at the children who monopolized center stage, but I had no confidence I could become like them. We all have something we couldn’t accomplish even if we were reborn. For me, becoming a core member of a group is an impossibility; it simply lies beyond me.
The first thing we learned once we made it to the class-room was a string of Japanese sentences: “Spring has come. Spring has come. Where has it come? It has come to the mountains. It has come to the fields.” We also learned a tune to go with the words.
Our textbook had a picture of cherry blossoms in full bloom, and cherry blossoms were already falling from the trees in Sajik Park. But although I climbed a hill every day on the way to school, I thirsted after real mountains and a spring worthy of the name. Not a single blade of mugwort sprouted at the foot of Mount Inwang, whose arid soil resembled pulverized rock. All that grew from it were doggedly clinging acacias. I’d never seen such trees in Pakchŏk Hamlet and found it impossible to warm up to them.
Worse, nothing grew in their shade and tempted me to stray from the well-trodden path into the forest. No unique mountain fragrance, no twittering birds. And no lepers either.
I had to make my way to school alone. Mother’s only concern was to send me to an elementary school inside the city gates. She didn’t give any thought to how unhappy I’d be without friends my age.
What I missed even more than my friends, though, were the hills of the countryside. I found Seoul’s hills odd, with their barren ground exposed between sparse, tired-looking trees, as though we were in the grip of a drought. To me, mountains, like fields, meant a constant supply of treats, and I knew well that the tasty snacks were found in the shade, rather than high up in the trees. Our hills back home had pines, but they were also thick with deciduous trees like chestnut, alder, zelkova, and various oaks. When autumn came around, piles of fallen leaves were heaped roof-high in every yard for use as winter fuel.
Even so, not all the leaves could be scraped off the hill. They decomposed over the years into soft, moist soil that made a fertile bed for grasses, herbs, mushrooms, and wild flowers of all sorts, although, of course, not all these grasses were useful to us.
Along the path from our outhouse to the backyard was a sea of what we called “dayflowers.” As we trampled their dark blue petals, the clear dewdrops on them bathed our feet. Joy would course into our bodies from the earth, invigorating us like sap, filling us with an impulsive delight. We’d take the leaves of the dayflower and make flutes from them that sang a faint, quavering tune.
At the foot of the hill grew a thicket so lush that when kids passed through it, nothing could be seen of them but bobbing heads. It wasn’t uncommon to find snake skins that had been sloughed off in the thicket’s midst. Some of these skins weren’t much to look at, but others had delicate patterns set against a white background so pure that I imagined them as the sashes of a wizard who’d descended from the mountains and ungirded himself to go to the bathroom. The hill that lay behind our house was hardly big or beautiful enough to make a worthy precinct for a mountain wizard. Even so, my eyes would dart about unconsciously, seeking traces of his visit.
Any time we spotted a snake skin, we were expected to take it home. The adults welcomed them even more than mountain herbs and mushrooms, for there was a superstition in our village that if you stored a skin inside a wardrobe, it would bring you good luck. As a rule, though, these luxuriant thickets hid nasty, sharp blades of grass. At times, our reward for retrieving a snake skin would be lacerated calves. Overall, though, the hill behind our village was like a baby—gentle and easy to approach, but bursting with a wonderful vitality.
The bare, enervated ridge in Seoul made me think instead of a dying old man. To relieve my loneliness on my daily climb, I dwelled in memories and found excuses to look down on my peers in Seoul. They could never know the translucent blue of the dayflower’s petals or the beautiful music that lurked within its leaves. Or how if you carefully scratched away the thick, gleaming flesh, you’d discover veins that were thinner and more delicate than summer silk. Or the sound the veins gave off when you vibrated them against your lips. I could barely get a noise to come out, but some kids could make beautiful, plaintive melodies.
After the cherry blossoms fell in Sajik Park, acacia flowers came into bloom. They permeated the whole of Mount Inwang with a nauseating milky smell. Packs of boys would travel from ridge to ridge, hunting for branches laden with blossoms, and then harshly snap them off so they could eat the petals.
Watchmen patrolled the forest. If they spotted boys snapping large branches, they’d rush over and wring their wrists until they cried out in pain. Most of these kids came from our poor district of Hyŏnjŏ-dong. At their age, three meals a day wasn’t enough to fully satisfy their hunger, but they seemed to break the branches more for the thrill of it—getting caught, fleeing, being yelled at by the watchmen. After the boys swept away, acacia branches with withered flowers would be strewn about the ground like rags.
That year was the first time I saw acacias and their blossoms. I learned that children in Seoul could also draw snacks from their surroundings. The more experienced ones would take a bunch of acacias and pluck one flower after another, savoring them like grapes. Once I surreptitiously tried a bunch, afraid I might get caught, but their milky, tepid, sweet taste made me nauseated. Only something fresh, I thought, could settle my stomach.
Suddenly shinga came to mind. In the countryside, they were as common as dayflowers, growing everywhere, at the foot of hills and along roadsides. They had jointed stalks and were at their plumpest and most succulent about the time wild roses came into bloom. We’d snap the reddish stalk, peel the skin, and eat the tangy inner layer. I thought their puckering tartness would be the perfect antidote for acacias.
I combed the hill frantically. I was like an animal looking for grasses to rub against a wound. But I couldn’t find a single stalk. Who ate up all the shinga? The Seoul ridge had run together in my mind with the hill behind our village. I retched until I was dizzy.
************
In early summer, the teacher was supposed to visit her students’ homes. Mother always demanded complete honesty from Brother and me, and from herself as well. They lavished a lot of attention on teaching us to be honest at school too. Our ethics textbook consistently emphasized that honesty came next to loyalty to the emperor as a virtue, and children who lied were subjected to severe humiliation from the teacher. We were repeatedly taught that if we found lost articles or money at school, we should take them to a teacher, and if we found them in the street, to policemen.
Mother scoffed: “If something’s lying on the ground, ignore it. Why pick it up? Whoever dropped it is bound to come back, so let him find it. Only showoffs take things to police or teachers.”
Mother’s logic was plausible, but open to an objection. What if the item was taken before the owner returned, I countered. Her response was unequivocal: it was wrong to make off with somebody else’s possessions, but it wasn’t our place to worry about it. Did Mother envision an ideal
society where a lost pouch of gold could be found exactly where it had been left? Or was doing a good deed for her limited to when she could prove to herself how upright she was?
The real issue, though, was that Mother’s fastidiousness about honesty drove her to be fastidious in her lies. She’d gotten me into the school she chose by lying about our official residence, and she was determined to stick to her fraud even through the teacher’s visit. I assume that her insistence stemmed from rural literal-mindedness and fear that I might be expelled if the truth came out. But I was sick and tired of going along with Mother’s hypocrisy and wanted us to be done with it all. Mother knew nothing about my life at school and seemed to think we could just cobble an act together for the impending visit. The date the teacher would go to Sajik-dong had already been set, so Mother asked the understanding of our relatives in allowing her to play resident for a day.
That day, the kids from Sajik-dong remained after school and went home with the teacher. The visits were organized in order of distance from the school, but since I didn’t say where I lived until the last moment, I was put last. No one paid any attention to me, a nobody in the class-room. Most pupils lived close to one another or crossed paths on the way to school, so they largely knew who lived where. When a girl said she’d never seen me in the neighborhood, the others chimed in and cast suspicious glances my way. Given my hick clothes, which differed so obviously from theirs, the remark was enough for them to consider me an utter heathen. I quickly smoothed over the crisis, saying we’d just moved from the countryside, but my relative’s next-door neighbor, a girl who looked both smart and sweet, stayed with me to the end. She suggested that we start going to school together the following day. I added another lie on top of the one I’d already concocted: “I can’t. We’re moving again in just a couple of days.”
Mother remained in the dark about all this. Sitting high on the veranda, she welcomed my teacher. The housemaid brought out fruit punch on a brass tray that had been polished until it gleamed. After getting through the day without mishap, Mother let out a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, the girl who lived next door to my relatives plagued me for a long time to come.